The Wives of Others

Are stay-at-home mothers putting themselves—and feminism—at risk?

When Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” forty-four years ago, she did more than launch a revolution by identifying “the problem that has no name”—the crushing ennui of the modern housewife. She also invited a bit of wordplay that has proved irresistible both to her detractors and to her would-be successors. If “The Feminine Mystique” has acquired the status of a classic, the various iterations of “The Feminine Mistake” have provided something of a barometer of a shifting cultural climate.

In 1967, “Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake,” by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll—a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. By 1971, the feminist movement was sufficiently well established to merit a parodic counterblast from the humorist Cal Samra, whose own “The Feminine Mistake” was, he claimed, “perhaps the first true masculinist tract since the Koran.” When Judith Posner’s “The Feminine Mistake” appeared, in 1992, it was time for feminist one-upmanship. Posner, a sociologist influenced by the burgeoning New Age movement, argued that those women who had followed Friedan’s counsel and sought to enter the workplace on a par with men had gained nothing but their own subjection to corporate culture, and would do well to cast aside career in favor of personal growth, forming a vanguard for the wholesale reformation of consumer capitalism. “We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise,” she maintained. “Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it.”

The latest “Feminine Mistake” (Voice; $24.95), by the journalist Leslie Bennetts, means to be a corrective to such correctives. Just as Posner’s book was conceived as a response to the media phenomenon of the overwhelmed Superwoman (Posner cited a Time cover from 1989 that featured a woman with a baby in one arm and a briefcase in the other, accompanied by the text “In the ’80s they tried to have it all. Now they’ve just plain had it. Is there a future for feminism?”), Bennetts’s book appears amid trend stories like one that was published, notoriously, in the Times in the fall of 2005, in which female Ivy League students disparaged the working-mother model of their mothers’ generation and declared an intention to be provided for by their future husbands as soon as they possibly could.

Bennetts, who is the same age as the mothers of those Ivy Leaguers, is appalled by that attitude. She argues that women must work, even after becoming mothers—not so much because, as Betty Friedan lyrically expounded, “if women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity,” as because a woman without a job or a career will be in dire economic straits if she loses her provider to death, desertion, or debility. Nor should a woman who leaves the workplace when her children are babies count on being able to rejoin it later; her skills may have become unmarketable, Bennetts warns, and her years off will be counted against her. “It’s nice to be at home when your child loses her fourth tooth,” she writes, “but is it worth the price you might pay if your breadwinner dies or divorces you, and you end up losing that home entirely?” The feminists of Bennetts’s youth proclaimed that a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle; Bennetts’s point is that bicycles get broken or stolen all the time.

She is alarmed that women aren’t taking precautions. Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier; a survey of women who graduated from Harvard Business School in the years 1981, 1986, and 1991 revealed that only thirty-eight per cent of those with children remained in full-time employment by 2001. A poll cited in a recent issue of Psychology Today claims that forty per cent of today’s women would prefer a return to the gender roles of the nineteen-fifties. “Once seen as a quaint relic of bygone times, the stay-at-home mother who depends on a husband for economic support while taking care of their home and children has come back into vogue with a vengeance, as newly stylish as a vintage alligator purse,” Bennetts writes. She has a particularly low opinion of mothers who decide not to work in order to have more time to shop for vintage alligator purses and go to lunches carrying them. Bennetts, like Friedan, concerns herself almost exclusively with the life styles of the well-off, and focusses on professional women or the wives of professionals; but even among women without professional qualifications, she thinks, the decision not to work is a cop-out. “Under questioning, many stay-at-home wives admit they were bored or unhappy with their work before quitting their jobs,” she writes. Their insistence that they are fulfilled by taking care of their families is, she says, “the socially acceptable cover story” for their failure to find work that they like enough to leave the kids with a sitter for it.

To Bennetts, the new “stay-at-home momism,” as she termed it in the 2005 magazine article from which this book grew, is a kind of nationwide female delusion: “a plague of silence across the land,” she says, with Friedanesque rhetoric. (Elsewhere, she cites a soccer mom turned entrepreneur who likens the divorce and desertion among her peers to “the slaughter of the lambs”—a slightly less inflamed metaphor than Friedan’s description of domesticity as “the comfortable concentration camp,” but along the same lines.) Where Friedan’s interviews convinced her of a pervasive discontent, though, Bennetts finds, and deplores, a pervasive contentment. Interview after interview reveals a woman who seems, actually, pretty happy with her lot, at least until Bennetts sweeps in and points out how terrible things will become if her husband leaves her. (A typical response to a question about plans for the future—“To be honest, I haven’t thought long and hard about that”—is provided by the stay-at-home mother of a two-year-old and a two-month-old, a woman who deserves a medal simply for answering the door to Bennetts.) The response of one woman to the bald question of what she would do if the worst were to happen—“I would get married again”—strikes Bennetts as so absurd as to be barely deserving of commentary, although half of all divorced women remarry within five years of their first marriage ending, and three-quarters remarry within a decade of a split.

To Bennetts, this domestic satisfaction is a travesty. Although she claims that her argument is an economic one, rather than one based on “values,” she believes not only that women have to work but that they should want to. She’s also convinced that working mothers are the best kind that children can have, teaching resourcefulness and independence by example, and demonstrating the virtue of engaging in work that one loves. A baby boomer to the core, Bennetts is happiest when she is quoting exultant, successful older women who have juggled work and child care and have come out the other side saying things like “You know what? I think my kids really benefited.” In her view, “a combination of good child care and an egalitarian marriage” is equal to the challenge of running a household, and she points to herself as a writer for Vanity Fair who works from home and also makes dinner for her kids every night, at least on those nights when she’s not interviewing Jennifer Aniston about being yet another woman who didn’t expect her husband to leave her.

Where Friedan’s book had empathy for the housewives she wrote about, its author finding her own domestic anomie mirrored in that of her interviewees, Bennetts’s encounters with the contemporary American wife have left her hopping with exasperation. “Stay-at-home mothers typically describe their domestic contributions as if there were no conceivable way a woman could manage to work and also to put nutritious food on the table at night,” a typical harangue concludes. The possibility that a younger generation of mothers might reject the boomer assumption that one would want to have it all, let alone manage to do so, is unfathomable to her.

Yet you needn’t doubt the appeal of an egalitarian marriage, good child care, and a job you love to wonder whether the new momism is necessarily the worst choice in the world for women who don’t have those satisfactions. Bennetts dismisses any suggestion that children beyond infancy might do better under the care of their mothers than they do in child care, but she is short on answers for women whose budgets do not stretch to hiring a well-chosen private surrogate. (Her children’s nanny is the second on a list of four women to whom the book is dedicated, after her mother but before her daughter and Betty Friedan.) And she seems impatient with anyone who has failed to find, as she has, the thrill of work, particularly work that grants a certain degree of child-friendly flexibility. (Then again, even a magazine writer who works from home is going to have to leave her baby with a nanny for long hours, unless she hires a nanny who can write.)

She barely considers the possibility that a woman might clear-sightedly find the rearing of her children the most rewarding work she can do, not out of a sense of self-sacrifice but out of a sense of personal fulfillment, a position eloquently characterized a few years ago in the book “Maternal Desire,” by the psychologist Daphne de Marneffe. Nor does she consider whether the flight from the workplace might be a justified rejection of a culture that assumes that parenting can be dealt with in the margins of one’s work life. There is a real economic cost when someone gives up work in favor of being a mother, as Ann Crittenden skillfully outlined six years ago in her book “The Price of Motherhood”; and that cost does, as Bennetts argues, become acute if a woman is unexpectedly widowed or divorced. But to some extent such circumstances can be hedged against with insurance policies and the efforts of a decent matrimonial lawyer. For many women, a contented life of motherhood and homemaking, even given the uncertainties, may offer better odds of satisfaction than the guaranteed stress of unloved work and the difficulties, emotional and practical, of surrendering to another the task of caring for one’s children.

Nor is the defensive crouch that Bennetts recommends likely to enhance a marriage, marriage itself being the epitome of a good-faith enterprise. Bennetts does women a service by pointing out the dangers of financial dependency in marriage, but emotional dependency is at the core of the marital relationship. It is reassuring to discover that this is as true of Bennetts as it is of the stay-at-home wives she interviews: in a recent magazine article, she wrote that she and her husband of eighteen years have “a life so intricately intertwined that I long ago ceased to be able to imagine a separate existence.” The briskness of her mandate (get a job) and the alarmism of her monition (you never know, he might leave you) hardly do justice to the complexity of married life, which encompasses vulnerability in the present and includes the hovering prospect of loss. The best way for a woman to be independent of a man is to refrain from marrying one, which is hardly a solution that Bennetts, her interview subjects, or her readers will find satisfactory. For all her efforts, the time isn’t likely to come soon when the Feminine Mistake can be retired as the name that has no problem. ♦

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